With Largest Staff Ever, New York City Reimagines How It Works

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Contractors for the city’s Sanitation Department distributed composting bins last month in Brooklyn. Nearly every city agency has more workers since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

After serving a tour in the sticky rice and fruit fields of northeast Thailand for the Peace Corps, Leanne Spaulding landed a job at a Virginia-based trade association, working her way to a master’s degree from Duke University in environmental management.

Now Ms. Spaulding is in New York, where she was recently hired by the city’s Sanitation Department.

Her duties, naturally, involve garbage, but not in the traditional sense: Ms. Spaulding is trying to help sell residents of the nation’s largest city on its ambitious composting effort. In that respect, her job is like thousands of others added in recent years that are slowly changing the day-to-day face of government service.

There are now nearly 294,000 full-time city employees, more than at any point in the city’s history. The growth under Mayor Bill de Blasio comes at a time of record revenues in a booming city, and has been across the board; nearly every city agency now employs more workers than it did in 2014, when the mayor took office.

The hiring has allowed the de Blasio administration to restaff agencies that were cut back by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg after the economic downturn of 2008. But Mr. de Blasio has gone far further, expanding the work force beyond its pre-recession peak, a costly investment that is not without risk: the city could be vulnerable to an economic downturn.

A report from Moody’s earlier this year heralded the diversity in the city’s economy, but noted that the city’s debt service, pension and retiree health care costs were growing rapidly. “Increasing headcount brings added costs with it in the future,” said Nick Samuels, a senior credit officer and the author of the report. “Keeping up with that over time will require additional economic growth.”

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Leanne Spaulding, a composting expert recently hired by the city, in Brooklyn last month. Her job is to help sell New Yorkers on the city’s growing composting effort.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Carol Kellermann, the president of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, questioned Mr. de Blasio’s decision to rapidly grow the city’s head count during flush times, saying that it made it more likely that new rounds of painful layoffs could be necessary in the city’s future.

“You don’t have to keep adding people every year,” she said. “You could manage what you have and use the staff that you have to run programs. Find a way to do the things you want to do with the existing work force.”

Mr. de Blasio is instead betting that the city can weather future economic shoals by setting aside reserves. And he remains committed to an expansive vision of government — perhaps most evident in the surge in hiring among the city’s uniformed and law enforcement agencies: the Police, Fire, Correction and Sanitation Departments, as well as the anticorruption Department of Investigation.

The Fire Department has expanded its civilian work force by 20 percent since June 2014, including more than 800 new emergency medical technicians. The new hiring has allowed the department to refocus on its most pressing calls — cardiac arrests and other medical emergencies — at a time when New York had fewer fatal fires last year than at any point in 100 years.

Police officers have been given unstructured time to engage with neighborhood residents and hear complaints, eschewing the blare of the radio for conversations.

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Capt. Jason Saffon of the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Service, second from left, and Fritz Joseph, a paramedic, far right, helped a woman who was struck by a car last month in the Bronx.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Sanitation workers are now flanked by civilian outreach teams in blue dress shirts with expertise in project management and mulch, helping New Yorkers make sense of its new composting plan.

And the Department of Investigation has added inspectors general for the police as well as the city’s hospitals, growing faster than every other area of city government. Its full-time staff of 352 is up almost 70 percent from where it was three years ago.

All that also costs money: The city spent almost $44 billion on its work force in the 2016 fiscal year, according to budget documents, and that is expected to rise to $51 billion by 2020.

Mr. de Blasio has been sensitive to the long-term implications of the city’s growing work force, from pensions to benefits: The average pension cost per employee of the city government is about $29,500 a year out of a total average compensation of $140,000, according to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission of the current fiscal year’s personnel spending and actual city head count.

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Mr. Joseph, a Bronx paramedic since 1997, is part of a program that uses a so-called fly car, which is meant to reach patients on the street more quickly than an ambulance.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

The mayor’s latest budget set aside $1.2 billion in reserves and adding hundreds of millions to a retiree health benefit trust fund. Mr. de Blasio has said that, if and when hard times return, he would not oppose cutting back.

The Bloomberg administration laid off thousands of workers after the recessions of 2002 and 2008, refilling those positions when the economy turned around. That created dramatic swings that “are not conducive to stable, consistent delivery of city services,” Ms. Kellermann, of the Citizens Budget Commission, said.

The trouble is that the mayor has few levers to pull on his own should good times end. Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city raised property tax rates in response to the recession. (A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said he had no plans to raise property taxes, but did not rule out ever doing so.)

For the moment, more employees mean more and new tasks. But how that plays out day to day is not always readily apparent.

On a recent Thursday morning, a call came in requesting assistance for a pedestrian hit by a car in the Bronx. Fritz Joseph, 45, a Bronx paramedic since 1997, and his partner, Capt. Jason Saffon of the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Service, were the first to arrive — not in an ambulance, but in a so-called fly car, a specially outfitted truck that rushes to serious emergencies but does not transport patients.

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Ms. Spaulding, the composting expert, during the distribution of bins in Brooklyn last month. The composting program has expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers under Mayor Bill de Blasio.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

The fly car — one of 10 in use in the Bronx, the first borough to try the approach — is meant to reach patients on the street more quickly than an ambulance, and to stay on the street when the emergency has passed. It’s a system that has been used in other American cities as well as in Europe.

“We definitely do more jobs,” Mr. Joseph said. “Almost one an hour.”

At the scene of the pedestrian accident, Mr. Joseph and Captain Saffon arrived just before the ambulance. A woman had been struck at slow speed in the parking lot of a Stop-and-Shop supermarket, and they helped her up. It seemed that she would not need further help, but after learning she was diabetic and testing her blood sugar, they decided to ride with her in the ambulance to the emergency room, to begin an IV.

At the Sanitation Department, staff members have been hired to work at its new transfer stations, to beef up its data-driven approach to snow removal and garbage routes, to upgrade its garages to include bathrooms for women, and to promote its composting initiative.

On a recent Friday morning in brownstone Brooklyn, some of the Sanitation Department’s nonuniformed workers handed out small brown bags filled with dirt from the city’s landfill that look like — and have been mistaken for — artisanal coffee beans. The bags showcase the end product of the composting process, and the dirt can be used in flowerpots and gardens.

The Sanitation Department has grown its civilian ranks by 14 percent since 2014 — to 2,150 workers, in addition to the 7,600 uniformed sanitation employees — by recruiting people like Ms. Spaulding, the composting expert.

On that Friday morning, Ms. Spaulding crisscrossed tree-lined streets in Clinton Hill, as brown bins for food waste and yard clippings clattered onto the doorsteps of unsuspecting homeowners, part of the city’s efforts to meet its goal of offering composting collection to all households by the end of 2018.

Outreach workers passed by in Zipcars with magnetic city logos stuck to the sides while rented box trucks double parked to deposit bins. Nearby, two other workers set up at a table by Fort Greene Park to explain the composting initiative, which has expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers under Mr. de Blasio.

“The unit that oversees this, it was three people,” Ms. Spaulding said, wearing a shirt with the agency’s logo and the words Recycling and Sustainability embroidered below. “It’s really exploded. I hope we grow more. There’s a need for it.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hiring Spree Alters Makeup Of City’s Staff. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe